Five minutes with Carey Mulligan

The Gatsby star on her penchant for period roles and playing the "never very genuine" Daisy Buchanan

“You’ve been cast in your fair share of costume dramas — is there something you’re drawn to about these older, classic stories?” I ask Carey Mulligan before the film starts. Apparently, this isn’t something she’s asked often.

“Have I, though?” she asks, shooting me a quizzical look. I quickly name a few examples as I have a small internal meltdown, worrying that it sounds like I’m typecasting her. But her co-star Tobey Maguire, who’s being bombarded with questions himself, overhears and steps in, joking: “Oh yeah, Carey ‘Period Piece’ Mulligan they call you, right?”

To my relief, she laughs. “That’s what they say,” she joins in.

“I’m just really excited by brilliantly written parts,” she explains. “So I guess I have done quite a few that happen to be in different era. But I think they’re just great parts that I’ve been lucky enough to play.”

The pair is joined at the hip for the entire evening, linking arms as they sweep around the room. Maguire is warm and inviting, coaxing Mulligan out of her shell. They’re clearly close; a fact Mulligan affirmed the next day when she spoke to Vogue’s Alexandra Spring. “Usually we would stay after work till the early hours of the morning talking about what we were doing the next day,” she said of her co-stars Maguire, Leonardo DiCaprio and Australian Joel Edgerton.

So what was it like, playing such an iconic — and polarising — character as Daisy Buchanan? After all, she’s Fitzgerald’s coquettish enigma who has been sparking unsympathetic reactions among readers for close to a century. At best, she’s described as a flighty, impressionable socialite; at worst, she’s denounced as vain, vapid, and even abhorrent in her attitude towards life, love and money.

“She’s just a great part for an actress,” Mulligan tells me. “She’s really erratic, constantly playing characters and she’s never very genuine. She’s pretty directionless and she’s led by people around her. That’s pretty fun to play.”

She plays it well, too. Mulligan, with all her ethereal beauty and delicate vulnerability, does a beautiful job at adding new warmth to Daisy’s character. She’s still effervescent, charming, and yes, extraordinarily selfish; but she’s also confused, almost infantile in her bewilderment.

Mulligan has most recently been cast in another adaption of a classic novel; she’ll play the impetuous but beautiful (sound familiar?) Bathsheba Everdene from Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd, and, after seeing her performance in Gatsby, one can only wonder what new characteristics she will bring to her next role.

Until then, with the Australian premiere the last leg of her whirlwind promotional tour, she’ll be taking a much-needed break from press junkets and letting Gatsby fever work its magic in the box office.